Anesthesiologist Slammed With Penalty After Trashing Patient Under Sedation

By: Christopher Feery | June 17, 2016

Surgery can be stressful and scary enough without allowing thoughts on the conversations of attending physicians to creep into our heads. According to the Washington Post, this man managed to record what was going on while he was down for the count, and what he heard prompted a lawsuit.

An unidentified man from Vienna, VA has been awarded a $500,000 judgment stemming from charges of defamation and medical malpractice. The man was being prepared for a colonoscopy when he decided to set his phone up to record the post-op instructions, and inadvertently recorded the whole procedure. When he listened to the recording, he was absolutely shocked to hear the doctors in attendance verbally trashing him.

The judgment was handed down against 42-year-old anesthesiologist Tiffany M. Ingham, previously of the Aisthesis anesthesia practice in Bethesda, MD. Tiffany has apparently moved on to Florida since the incident, but the recording was shared in court, and it paints her in an extremely unflattering light.

“After five minutes of talking to you in pre-op, I wanted to punch you in the face and man you up a little bit,” Tiffany says at one point.

She continually mocked the man throughout the recording, but she wasn’t the only one who used incredibly poor judgment that day. Gastroenterologist Solomon Shah also took part in the running commentary, and took things a step further by writing on the man’s chart that he had hemorrhoids, when in fact the man was hemorrhoid-free. Shah was dismissed early in the case, and it’s not clear if he faces further action from the Virginia Board of Medicine.